Films, Union- Sponsored

FILMS , UNION-SPONSORED. Immediately following World War II, radicals attempted to revive the ambience of the New Deal coalition by making films with and for industrial unions. One of the most important collectives was Union Films, which produced a series of films in cooperation with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) for distribution throughout the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Carl Marzani, who had joined the Communist Party shortly after fighting in the Spanish Civil War and had been a section organizer until his resignation from the Party in 1942, was the major figure in Union Films. His goal was to create a network of union-hall film centers, a library of working-class films, a book club, and a slick labor magazine on the model of Life.

The working-class cultural offensive envisioned by Marzani was to be truncated by Cold War politics, but between 1946 and 1950 Union Films produced seven black-and-white documentaries: Deadline for Action (1946, 40 min.), The Great Swindle (1949, 22 min.), Industry’s Disinherited (1949, 21 min.), Our Union (1949, 22 min.), Men against Money (1949, 25 min.), The Fishermen (1950, 20 min.), and Solidarity (1950, 11 min.). Marzani scripted/directed most of these, including Deadline and Swindle. Deadline was the first American film to place major responsibility for the Cold War on the United States, while Swindle explained the relationship between wages, prices, profits, and monopoly control of key sectors of the American economy. One animated sequence in Swindle depicted capitalism as a world-devouring octopus, and as in all Union Film productions the representatives of capital were treated in a rude and negative manner reminiscent of images popularized by the Industrial Workers of the World. Our Union and Solidarity attacked the Taft-Hartley Act, Men dealt with a UE strike in Lynn, Massachusetts, Industry’s Disinherited probed the problems of aging workers, and The Fishermen showed how antitrust laws were used to attack the International Fishermen’s Union.

Deadline for Action won the approval of Philip Murray and Alex Kroll of the CIO and got a tremendous sendoff in CIO News. Thereafter, as the CIO began to swing to the right, most of the films were shown only by expelled left-wing unions. Marzani was jailed for political activity for approximately a year beginning in March 1949. During his absence, the city of New York harassed Union Films with zoning violation fines and other restrictions. Under such pressures and the accelerating assault upon the UE itself, Union Films folded.

After emerging from prison, Marzani persisted in trying to implement his larger vision. He worked on publications for the UE and was editor of UE Steward, a leadership magazine, until 1954. At that time he established the Liberty Book Club with Angus Cameron, a radical editor previously employed by major publishers. One of the first books released was Labor’s Untold Story, published for the UE and reflecting its views. The Liberty Book Club offered members eight books for a ten-dollar yearly membership. The venture’s name eventually changed to Cameron Associates and when Cameron left became Marzani and Munsell. The various imprints produced the first book on the Rosenberg case, the first exposé of informers for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and one of the first books on armed black resistance in the civil rights movement. The ventures also published novels and other writing by Ring Lardner, Jr., Alvah Bessie, Abe Polonsky, and Albert Maltz. Five or more pamphlets a year were published and addressed issues such as the Bay of Pigs, the war in Vietnam, and the Warren Commission Report. Publishing activities ended in 1969, when a fire destroyed the Marzani and Munsell offices, which housed all the company’s books, mailing lists, and records. The publishers had not been able to secure insurance.

A revival of the filmmaking tradition Marzani hoped to bring to a mass audience occurred in the early 1950s when Salt of the Earth was filmed with the cooperation of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Based on a 1951–1952 strike by predominantly Mexican American zinc miners in Silver City, New Mexico, the film used the actual strikers for virtually every leading role. The major exception was Rosaura Revueltas, a Mexican film star who played the female lead. Professional actors such as Will Geer played supporting roles depicting management and the police. The filmmakers—director Herbert Biberman, writer Michael Wilson, producer Paul Jarrico, and less well known technicians—were on the Hollywood blacklist. They have since stated that Salt of the Earth was the kind of film they would have made in Hollywood, had they been allowed to express their political views.

No American film has ever faced the harassment endured by Salt of the Earth. Vigilante groups shot into the cars of the filmmakers and beat up some of the crew, and Revueltas was intimidated by immigration officials, who ultimately deported her as an illegal alien before the film was completed. Congressman Don Jackson (California) and Hearst columnist Victor Riesel charged the film was just a cover so that “Communists” could get near the atomic testing grounds at Los Alamos. Various film processors and technicians refused to work on the film, and when the film was finally ready for distribution, numerous groups and individuals emerged to accuse anyone who wished to see or screen the film of being a Communist or a Communist dupe. Roy Brewer, the anticommunist head of the American Federation of Labor’s Hollywood Film Council, pledged that projectionists and other professionals who were members of his union would not show the film and would do anything in their power to keep it off the screen. The American Legion undertook a campaign that was directly responsible for the film being kept out of several locations. Pickets and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were present at the few sites where the film got a showing.

Given such an environment it is amazing that the film was completed and that it managed to get sporadic screenings in ten cities. The net result of the persecution, of course, was that the film was a financial loss and the chance for further radical feature filmmaking had been killed in the cradle. The film, however, was to prove remarkably viable. Sixteen-millimeter prints were made and Salt of the Earth began to acquire legendary stature. In the late 1960s the New Left filmmakers claimed Salt as part of their patrimony and activists began to screen it. During the 1970s, the film moved more solidly into the educational film market, being shown in filmmaking classes, history classes, and contexts in which the blacklist period was being examined. Books began to appear on how the film was made and in 1984 the film A Crime to Fit the Punishment examined the making, suppression, and impact of Salt of the Earth. By decade’s end, the film was recognized as one of the finest radical films ever made in the United States and a film honored by nonpolitical as well as political critics.

The basis of Salt of the Earth’s fame lies exactly in its political sensibilities. The most obvious level of the film is that of the conflict between the Mine-Mill trade unionists and a sheriff totally under the control of the company. Naive critics thought the film simplistic in its portrayals. If anything, the film was relatively mild in depicting a decades-old struggle in which company lawlessness was the rule. What stands out even more strongly than the class struggles are related themes of sexual and ethnic repression. The striking miners are forced to deal with their own oppression of their wives in order to win the strike, and the strike leader is the worst culprit. This intraclass struggle along a sexual dynamic would have considerable poignancy for post-1960s radicals facing sexism as a major political issue. That the miners were mainly Mexican Americans underscored a basic reality about the West not visible in most Hollywood films. Another layer of ethnic reality is provided by the circumstance that both the union organizer who counsels the miners and the sheriff who leads the fight against them are Anglos.

The filmmakers have written that they had to reshape their original concept for a labor film and had to rewrite many scenes in order to satisfy the objectives of the miners with whom they were working. Even with their anemic budget and the constant harassment, the filmmakers were able to bring sophisticated cinematic techniques to a story taken directly from life and filmed on real-life scenes of battle. In that sense Salt of the Earth realized to a large degree the ambition voiced by radicals since at least the time of the Film and Photo League to make films for, by, and with the working class.

The financial and political debacle that immediately accompanied the release of Salt of the Earth discouraged any further union ventures into radical filmmaking. A full ten years would pass before there was any effort in the direction indicated by the UE and Mine-Mill projects. This new initiative, The Inheritance (1964), was undertaken by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers on the occasion of the union’s fiftieth anniversary. Composed mainly of old newsreels and still photos, The Inheritance traces the history of labor from 1900 through to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, March on Washington, with the history of the Amalgamated as a unifying core. The film’s tone is set by its opening lines: “Today is born of yesterday. And there is no birth without pain.” Class conflict is underlined by scenes of bloody encounters between police and workers. These include newsreel segments showing the on-camera murder of Communist pickets in a steel strike and the carnage at the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago. The film also includes clips of Norman Thomas and other leftists, although they are not usually identified by name. Capitalist values are ridiculed by clever and often humorous editing. Partly due to the need to reach the increasing number of black and Hispanic workers in the industry the Amalgamated represents, racism is addressed in no uncertain terms. The film is far more timid ideologically. The socialist aspects of the Amalgamated’s history are downplayed and there is no rendering of Sidney Hillman’s complex relationship with the Communist, Socialist, and American Labor parties.

The power of The Inheritance derives from its graphic and unequivocal support of rank-and-file militancy and its dramatic assertion that for the immigrant worker, the United States was “half-nightmare/half-dream.” Original music for the film was created by George Kleinsinger and contains a chorus repeated several times: “Freedom doesn’t come like a bird on a wing./ Doesn’t come like the summer’s rain./Freedom, freedom is a hard won thing and/Every generation has to win it again.” Other labor oriented songs feature Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton, the Almanac Singers, and other musicians associated with left-wing causes. The film has a narration by Hollywood actor Robert Ryan written by Millard Lampell, who was on the Hollywood blacklist. Lampell had been writing scripts under assumed names and had had television scripts produced through the kind of process satirized in Woody Allen’s The Front. His official rehabilitation came in 1965, when he won an Emmy Award for the television drama Eagle in a Cage.

Despite the film’s radical subtext and its use of blacklisted talent, The Inheritance received good reviews in the conventional press. Finding wide acceptance among labor educators as well, the film was soon established as a classic of its kind. The Inheritance also won cinematic awards, including first prize at the prestigious Mannheim Festival in Germany. The Amalgamated, however, did not undertake new projects of like nature and no other union came forward to follow its lead. Unions generally settled for films that lauded their own organization or that could be used for technical training.

When a new generation of radical filmmakers began to emerge in the 1970s, labor unions were not prepared to risk their respectability through direct sponsorship. They increasingly thought it safer economically and politically to give grants to filmmakers who had raised funds from other sources as well. The most noteworthy undertaking of this sort was funding by the United Mine Workers toward the costs of Harlan County, USA (1976), a film that won the Academy Award for that year’s Best Feature Documentary and had a modest theatrical release. The film’s radical tone was due more to the bitter class relationships depicted on the screen rather than to ideological commentary inserted by the filmmaker. This stemmed from director Barbara Kopple’s belief that the filmmaker should avoid being an invisible all-knowing off-camera voice and simply allow the participants in a struggle to speak for themselves. Trade unions were also willing to use some specifically radical films such as Union Maids (1976), With Babies and Banners (1978), and The Wobblies (1981) in educational programs. Even Salt of the Earth gained belated inclusion on lists of films recommended by AFL-CIO.

Although national unions did not fund major film projects, local and regional units often collaborated informally with filmmakers funded by other sources. An example is Amie Williams’ One Day Longer (2000), the story of a successful six-year strike of 550 hotel and restaurant workers at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. A film with much greater popular impact was American Factory (2019) a film dealing with a factory being transformed by an entrepreneur based in China. Written and directed by long-time radical filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, American Factory had funding from of a foundation organized by Michelle and Barack Obama. The film won the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary of 2019. It was screened in theaters, but its major impact was on millions of viewers who saw it on the Netflix television service.

Biberman, Herbert. Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film. New York: Zoetrope-Beacon Press, 1987.

Crowdus, Gary. “Citizens with Cameras: An interview with Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar.” Cineaste XLV, n. 1 (2019).

Crowdus, Gary, and Lenny Rubenstein. “Union Films: An Interview with Carl Marzani.” Cineaste 7, no. 2 (1976).

Miller, Tom. “Salt of the Earth Revisited.” Cineaste 13, no. 3 (1984).

Wilson, Michael. Salt of the Earth. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978.